Levels of Key Brain Antioxidant Linked to Alzheimer’s Can Be Monitored in Patients, Study Says

A study has identified two forms of glutathione (GSH) — an important antioxidant that protects the brain from harmful free radicals — in the brains of living people using a non-invasive technique. It also found one form of GSH at levels significantly lower than usual in people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
Its non-invasive technique was based on magnetic resonance spectroscopy — an ionizing-radiation-free technique that allows the study of metabolic changes in the brain — and may serve as an important diagnostic tool.
The study, “A Multi-Center Study on Human Brain Glutathione Conformation using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy,” was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
High levels of cellular oxidative stress — a disproportion between free radicals (potentially harmful, unstable molecules) and antioxidants (molecules that can stabilize free radicals) — are increasingly associated with age-related diseases, namely neurodegenerative disorders such as AD.
In fact, strong evidence, mostly coming from postmortem studies, sow that AD patients’ brains are depleted of GSH compared to controls.
A team led by researchers at the National Brain Research Center in India, and Case Western Reserve University in Ohio conducted an in-depth analysis of GSH in 29 healthy adults.
Data was collected using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), a non-invasive technique that measures molecular substances

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